Rajaram unrepentent!

[Robert Zydenbos]

Am 27 Sep 2000, um 6:59 schrieb Swaminathan Madhuresan:

> >Has he mentioned what his criterion is for "empirical data"? My
> >hunch is that he has not.
>
> At another place, Rajaram has expoused his idea as to why Dravidian is
> not independent of Sanskrit.
>  "The basic claim now, and one that is central to the linguistic
> interpretation of ancient India is: there was a stage in the
> evolution of so-called Dravidian languages when they were free
> from the influence of Sanskrit; otherwise the whole idea of
> Dravidian as a separate language family falls to the ground. Tamil
> is the oldest language of this family and its literature goes back
> only to about 100 BCE. By then it was already heavily influenced by
> Sanskrit language and literary forms. Thus from an empirical point
> of view there is no evidence whatsoever to suppose that any of the
> so-called Dravidian languages ever existed independently of
> Sanskrit."

Typically the talk of a mathematician: 'let x be parallel to y,...' But
who says that x and y are parallel in the first place? Once again:
reasoning that starts from dubious premises and imposes arbitrary
limitations (such as are grist on his own mill) on the topic under
consideration. From where did he get that "basic claim"? (Probably
no reference to academic literature there!) Indeed: no foggy clue of
what linguistics is.

By the same criterion, he must be one of those people who thinks
that Urdu is derived from Arabic and Persian - which would suit a
Hindutva purpose just fine. And Hindi will never have existed
independently of English - ha! what new perspectives and
possibilities! :-)))

RZ